Sacred Ground (38 page)

They stared at each other in the silence of the woodland, the woman of the woods and the woman of the city, both with long braids and dark, leaf-shaped eyes. The moment held a brief magic as the winter silence embraced the two. Then the older woman turned and disappeared through the trees.

Angelique slipped her hand into Seth’s, and said, “I want to go back to Los Angeles. I want to see if the hacienda is still there, if Grandmother Angela is still alive.”

“We’ll go straightaway, my dearest. That’s where we’ll start our farm. In the light and sunshine, and we’ll never know darkness again.”

Chapter Fifteen

Erica couldn’t stop thinking about Jared’s kiss.

It had been so unexpected, so electrifying that for an instant she had thought she was going to catch on fire and explode. And then she had fainted. Lack of oxygen the paramedics had said. From being sealed in the cave for so long.

It was all she could think about, even after the stunning find she had made that morning as they were clearing away the last of the rubble from the cave-in. Even after she had opened the mysterious oilskin bag and realized what she was looking at, even after she had taken it to Jared and seen how instantly excited he had become over it, even after she had let the significance of the new find settle in— she could still think of nothing but the way Jared had kissed her when he had pulled her from the cave.

The police had caught Charlie “Coyote” Braddock and he confessed to planting explosives at the cave entrance in order to stop further excavating. And because the incident had generated heated debate on all sides— from those wanting the cave sealed to those wanting it opened as a tourist attraction— Erica and Jared had stepped up their race to find the most likely descendant of the skeleton. The oilskin bag Erica had found that morning seemed about to provide them with an unexpected clue.

The bag had contained a parchment, mildewed but still legible, that turned out to be the land grant to a property called Rancho Paloma, deeded to someone named Navarro. The landmarks drawn on the deed—
la cienegas
(the marshes),
la brea
(the tar),
El Camino Viejo
(the Old Road)— marked off a section of prime Los Angeles real estate that was clearly defined even today. El Camino Viejo had undergone many name changes since the Spaniards— Orange Street, Sixth Street, Los Angeles Avenue, and Nevada Avenue— until its present-day name was settled upon: Wilshire Boulevard.

So now Erica and Jared were at the office of the Los Angeles City Archives, where they had spent the morning going through public records dating as far back as 1827, sitting at tables piled with documents, reports, bound volumes, maps, photographs, computer disks and videotapes. Jared was running searches on titles and deeds and land grants while Erica was tracing family names.

She finally leaned back and stretched, taking a moment to watch Jared as he sat in deep concentration over old records. The kiss had been both urgent and tender, and when she had parted her lips, his tongue had touched hers. It had been over in an instant, but it had packed more punch than a lifetime of hand-holding and stolen glances. Jared had lit a fire in her that continued to burn even now, so that when he reached for his coffee, she thought it was the sexiest gesture she had ever seen. “Any luck?” she asked.

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at her. Erica could swear she saw an arc of electricity zap from his eyes to hers. Those dark irises positively smoldered. “As near as I can figure, Rancho Paloma was carved up and sold to newcomer Americans in 1866,” he said in a voice that betrayed a desire to speak of more intimate things than historical records. Or so Erica imagined. In truth, she had no idea what Jared was thinking. After that one impulsive kiss there hadn’t been another.

“So is that when the deed was buried in the cave?” she said. “In 1866?” Because of the explosion and cave-in, and subsequent clearing of the rubble, there was no way to accurately determine at which level the deed had been buried.

“Perhaps. Maybe someone was trying to stop the sale and thought that burying the deed would do the trick.”

“But why in
our
cave? Why bury the deed to property in the cave of the First Mother?”

Jared absently massaged his jaw. “It’s almost as if,” he murmured, “by burying the deed in the cave, someone was symbolically giving the land back to the First Mother.”

“Someone connected to her perhaps, a descendant?”

Their eyes met and the same thought occurred to them both at the same instant: “If that’s so,” Erica said in sudden excitement, “and if we can find the present-day descendents of these original Navarros, then chances are we might find the identity of our skeleton!”

Jared pushed his chair back and stood up, lifting his arms above his head. Erica feasted her eyes on the way his shirt pulled over sculpted muscles. “What have you found on the Navarros?” he asked. Jared was having a hard time concentrating on the task that had brought them here. His mind was filled with the incredible story Erica had told him after she had crawled out of the collapsed cave.

Jared had sat with her while she calmed down, and she had told him a remarkable tale about being abandoned when she was five years old and living in foster homes until she had been rescued by a woman lawyer she didn’t know. And that was why she was fighting so hard to save the Emerald Hills Woman, she said, because no one else was going to. Now he understood her motivation. According to the legal system, sixteen-year-old Erica was supposedly already being taken care of by the state, and yet a serious misrepresentation of the facts of her case had been about to cause such a miscarriage of justice as to toss the girl into a penal system from which she might never emerge. What the attorney had done was see the
personal
aspect of the case. Erica had not been just a number on the court docket, but a person with rights. Just like the Emerald Hills Woman, who was likewise supposedly being taken care of by the state, yet who was about to be buried, to be forgotten forever.

He wished he could have met Lucy Tyler. After she was appointed guardian ad litem to Erica, she found a better foster placement for her and made regular visits. “She became my mentor,” Erica had explained. “God knows what she saw worth salvaging in me, but I wanted to please her and do well for her. I think that deep down I had no sense of self-worth, so my motivation to make something of myself didn’t come from a belief in myself but rather that I believed in her. I took her name after I graduated from high school. She died the week I received my Ph.D. Lymphoma. She had kept it a secret so I wouldn’t be distracted from my studies.”

“Not much,” Erica said now in response to his question about the Navarros. She had been going through a large book titled,
California’s Founding Families.
“All it says in here is a Navarro family lived on Rancho Paloma. But it gives no further information about them. There are thousands of Navarros currently residing in LA County. Even if we decided to check each one out, that would be assuming the Navarros of Rancho Paloma even stayed in LA.”

He nodded. “Well, I’m hungry. There’s a burrito stand downstairs. Do you want beef or bean?”

“Chicken,” she said. “And any diet soft drink.” She watched him go, marveling at this sudden and unexpected turn in her life. Of all the men who had tried to penetrate the barrier around her heart, Jared Black, her old enemy, was not the one she would ever have predicted to be the victor. What now? Was the next move hers? But how could she be sure he had meant to start something with that kiss? What if he regretted it and wished he could take it back? Suddenly the future, with its promise of mystery and surprise, both excited and frightened her.

She forced her mind back to reality: how to link the deed to the cave?

Erica contemplated the formidable mother lode of historical evidence available for their search: newspaper archives; birth, death, and marriage records; the license bureau; county tax assessor; police files. There were thousands of records, annals, chronicles, memorabilia, memoranda, rolls, registers, statistics, lists, ledgers, public papers, and court transcripts.

Where to begin?

Deciding to start with statistics— to see if she could find any Navarros that had died between 1865 and 1885— she sat at an available computer terminal and selected the database. The records that far back were sketchy, with question marks following many of the names. When Jared came back with lunch and sat next to her, unwrapping the aromatic burritos, she said, “Maybe we should just take out an ad in the paper. ‘Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Mr. or Mrs. Navarro, circa 1866…’ “

He shook his head and laughed.

Erica took the cap off her diet cola. “I feel like filing a missing persons report!”

They ate in silence for a while as they watched others come and go— teachers, historians, writers, people doing genealogical research on their families— until Erica realized she was staring at a red-haired young woman who was asking the clerk for help tracking down the ancestors of a family named McPherson, who had come to Los Angeles at the turn of the century. “They were my mother’s people,” Erica heard the young woman say.

And Erica felt her heart leap.

Quickly setting aside her burrito, she returned to the computer terminal, closed the statistics database, and opened up the LAPD database on closed and noncurrent files. Search parameters were listed by division, department, and date. She selected Missing Persons and stared at the screen for a long moment before she was aware of the idea that had begun to form in her mind:
Was my mother’s disappearance ever reported?

Although she had tried to search for her family years ago, the computer database that was available now hadn’t existed then. Searching had required going through vast quantities of paper files and records, a time-consuming and ultimately futile task. But now, on a sudden hopeful impulse, instead of searching for Navarros Erica typed in “1965,” the year her mother had arrived at the hippie commune. She added: “female,” “Caucasian,” “pregnant,” and “under thirty years of age.” Telling herself that it was a long shot, she nervously drummed her fingers as she waited for the results to appear. What were the chances anyway? It was only a guess that her mother had run away from home to become a hippie. She could have left with her parents’ knowledge. Maybe they were even glad to be rid of her, so no missing persons report would have been filed.

When the results came back, she anxiously scanned the names of girls reported missing. A lot of teenage runaways that year, some pregnant.
Any one of these could have been my mother.

She scrolled back and read the list more carefully, silently mouthing the names to see if any rang a bell.

Then:
Monica Dockstader. Seventeen years old. Brown hair, 5‘7”, 140lbs, four months pregnant. Last seen Greyhound Bus Station, Palm Springs.

Dockstader. It resonated with something in the far reaches of her mind. And the date! June. Which meant Monica Dockstader’s baby had been due in November. The month Erica was born.

Going to the main desk, Erica requested microfilms of newspapers from 1965, confining her search to the
Los Angeles Times
and the
Herald Examiner.
She carried them to a viewer and, with trembling fingers, loaded the first film.

It took less than five minutes.

“Oh my God!”

Jared looked up. “You’ve found something?”

“I think I’ve found…” She turned wide eyes to him. Her voice dropped a notch. “My mother…”

He came to stand behind her and frowned at the newspaper headline on the viewer:
“Heiress of Palm Springs Date Empire Vanishes. Search Under Way. Reward Offered.”
The thirty-five-year-old article was brief, with statements from the girl’s parents asking her to come home. “She is currently going by the name Moonbeam,” Kathleen Dockstader, Monica’s mother, had told the police.

“Moonbeam…” Erica whispered. The baldheaded man, thirty years ago, telling the social worker, “She went by Moonbeam.”

“Looks like she wasn’t kidnapped,” Jared said. “She ran away. The only reason the case got even this much press is because the family was wealthy. It says here the Dockstaders were the oldest and largest exporters of dates in the United States. I wonder if they’re still in business.”

Erica reached out and touched the monitor. Were the two distraught middle-aged people in the news photo her grandparents?

Jared leaned closer. “Good God, Erica. Look at the photo at the bottom of the page. That girl, Monica Dockstader. She could be a younger version of you!”

* * *

“Does any of this look familiar to you?” Jared asked as he guided his Porsche off Highway 111 and onto Dockstader Road.

Erica looked out at the rows of stately date palms that went on for what seemed like miles, and beyond, tawny desert backed by mountains capped with snow turning pink in the setting sun. “No. But I was born in a commune up north and as far as I know didn’t leave until I was taken to the hospital in San Francisco. I was five years old then, and after that I was placed in foster homes. I don’t think I’ve ever been here.”

On the Internet they had found a website for Dockstader Farms, over a thousand acres of rich date palms located near Palm Springs in the Coachella Valley, boasting a restaurant, gift shop, and tours of the grounds and packing plant, with free samples to all visitors. The website had a section titled “About Our Family.” Erica had expected it to be the story of the Dockstaders. Instead it was a description of the
corporate
family— from vice president on down to the date pickers.

Erica had telephoned from the archives office to be told that Mrs. Dockstader was not taking any appointments and would not be available until she returned from a six-month vacation. Erica had briefly considered telling the secretary who she was— surely Mrs. Dockstader would be available for her long-lost granddaughter— and then thought it might be better to simply drive out here. News like this should not come over a phone and through a secretary, and it couldn’t wait since Mrs. Dockstader was leaving tomorrow.

They drove past a sign that said “Established 1890,” past the visitor parking lot, and followed a small paved lane flanked by massive oaks and willows. When they came to a sign that said “Private Residence, No Public Access Beyond This Point,” Jared kept driving. Erica closed her eyes and felt her heart gallop. She knew what they were going to find at the end of the lane: a huge Victorian gingerbread built at the turn of the last century, filled with antiques and family history, and at its heart, Kathleen Dockstader, a kindly, grandmotherly seventy-two-year-old widow with arthritic hands and white hair. Erica could almost smell the woman’s lavender scent as she said tearfully, “Yes, I am your grandmother,” and took Erica into a loving embrace.